Mike McDaniel is a former police officer who writes at PJ Media to burst some misconceptions and point out some uncomfortable truths to readers about the realities of policing and and why you should have little faith in gun control. As always, read the whole thing, but there is one point I want to especially emphasize:

Time Is Not On The Side Of The Good Guys

Response times for emergencies vary enormously from place to place. In some rural or semi-rural areas, emergency response is measured in hours. Even in towns or cities, a five-minute response — from the moment an officer receives the radio call until he arrives in a school parking lot — would be amazingly fast.

Consider, however, that a radio call likely would not have been made until someone at the school realized what was happening and made a call, a call that will take precious seconds — even minutes — to make and to be understood. By the time a radio signal flashes out, a shooter could easily have been shooting for five minutes or more.

And even when that first officer arrives in the parking lot, he will likely not have clear directions. Few police officers have so much as been inside every school in their jurisdiction; fewer know them well. Even if that first officer can hear continuing gunfire, unless by chance he happens to enter the school near the shooter it will take additional minutes to find and stop the shooter. Unless the shooter stops him first.

Every minute is an eternity in a school attack. Every minute costs lives. All competent police officers know this; it’s one of their greatest frustrations. They know that in virtually every imaginable scenario, the real issue is how many will die before they are in a position to do anything.

They also know that if the modern history of school shootings is any guide, the shooter will virtually always have killed himself long before they arrive.

In virtually every American school shooting, the police have had no role in stopping the shooter.

As a friend once told me, “When every second counts, help via 911 is minutes away.”

And anyone who believes any different, who puts their faith in restrictive gun laws and “gun-free zones,” is just a deluded fool.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People isn’t too excited about the appointment of Rep. Tim Scott to South Carolina’s soon-to-be-vacated U.S. Senate seat.

(…)

Hilary Shelton, senior vice president for advocacy and policy at the NAACP, told The Daily Caller Monday afternoon that the group welcomed diversity in the Senate, but expects the new senator to work against the NAACP’s agenda.

“It is important that we have more integration in the U.S. Senate,” said Shelton in a phone interview. “It’s good to see that diversity.”

“Mr. Scott certainly comes from a modest background, experience, and so forth, and should be sensitive to those issues,” he said, referring to Scott’s impoverished single-parent upbringing in Charleston, SC.

“Unfortunately, his voting record in the U.S. House of Representatives raises major concerns,” Shelton said.

Shelton explained that the NAACP platform is crafted through an annual voting process which engages grassroots-level delegates who vote on the group’s national agenda. That agenda calls for an expansive role for federal government spending in black communities.

Because federal intervention has done such a bang-up job for Blacks. Just ask any beneficiary of the Great Society’s urban policies. And that War on Poverty? We fought it, and poverty won.

While Ms. Shelton does have some nice things to say about Congressman Scott, it’s clear her views are trapped within the statist, dependent, and identity-group paradigm that dominates the Democratic party. And yet Blacks are far worse off under Obama, who is pursuing those very policies the way an alcoholic chases a beer wagon. But, to be honest, the NAACP stopped being an organization seeking the best interests of African Americans at the same time they entered into a monogamous relationship with the Democratic party. (Helpful tip: if you’re an interest group and you give yourself wholly and forever to one political party — they no longer have to take you seriously, because they know they have your votes no matter what they do.)

Meanwhile, here’s hoping that Mr. Scott has a long and fruitful career in the Senate and that, rather than coming round to the NAACP line, he encourages NAACP members to realize there’s another, better way to help Black Americans prosper.

I wonder if it occurs to fans of gun-control or gun elimination that some of the things their “mainstream” people say are for more violent and incendiary than almost anything coming from even fringe 2nd amendment defenders?

Nah. That would require a sense of irony, shame, and self-awareness. Or even basic sentience.

Anyway, the latest (1) in a growing line of liberal “thought leaders” fantasizing about violence against gun-rights advocates is Assistant Professor Erik Loomis of the University of Rhode Island, who retweeted a death wish against those who advocated arming some school personnel: (Language warning, and so below the fold)

This is an excellent take-down of the shoddy use of statistics by the anti-2nd amendment crowd. That it also shoves a grapefruit in the face of The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein is an added bonus. (via Baseball Crank)

Ezra Klein leaps proudly into the gun control controversy, claiming that he’s just presenting a list of 12 “facts” to help inform the debate. There are many things wrong with his list, but in this post I want to focus on just two:

5. America is an unusually violent country. But we’re not as violent as we used to be.